I would suppose English (don't do dat). Note, you don't have a case of double negatives, merely the ambiguous "Everybody doesn't understand" I am not sure what is better (of the logically equivalent but rhetorically separate) 'jan li sona ala' or 'jan pi ali ala li sona' 'jan ala li sona' is too strong, as the next sentence shows. (there is the usual unresolved issue of the scope of 'ala', here taken to be only predicate long).

So there are at least 7 different grammatical readings for the first 2 words of a verb phrase. Plus each word has maybe 4-5 semantic meanings, so that is a search space of 7 * 5 * 5 different possible meanings. The semantic search space is easier than the grammatical because the possible semantic meanings of one word are clustered, but there is a much bigger psychological distance between "li wili moku" to want to eat and to starve, or the predicate sense vs the intransitive sense of a phrase (li tawa tomo).

Maybe the worst phrase would be, "li wile kama tawa" or "li wile kama tawa moku" Not sure what they mean but because these have both auxiliary and ordinary meanings, there seems to be a lot of possible grammatical readings.

I think you are overly pessimistic. As for predicates (what comes after 'li') you havenouns that stay nouns (unless transitivized -- in which case they mean "makes object (after 'e') be a ...")modifiers that stay modifiers (unless transitived -- as above)verbs that stay verbs (change slightly when transitive, or, more likely, when intransitive)prepositions disguised as verbs ('tawa' class take nouns as complements)modals (take verb predicates as complement, 'wile' class)'kama' that is somewhere in between (takes modifier and noun predicates, but not noun complements and lotsa other strange stuff)All of these can be modified adverbially, nouns and modifiers also by nouns and modifiers. And 'ala,' which does its own thing.The tricky part is to notice that the grouping of all these critters is different for modifiers and for complements.Sorry, that just looks worse than before. but it is easy, once you get the hang of it, though hard to put into words succinctly. In any case, a given word doesn't enter into so many grammatical possibilities -- most have only one or two, and the worst I know has like four, usually clearly distinct (but, when not, doozies).

This information is interesting to me. Well, 'sona ni (borrowing your form) li namako e mi' 'li musi tawa mi' (not sure about that, but I think that is how the pieces line up, though 'musi e mi' may work , too). The crucial point is that the object of 'sona' is some mental thing, either what you know or what you mean, not you yourself.

depending on what the rest is 'wile kama tawa moku' can means as little as "wants to come to dinner," than which we can surely find something more complex. I like "wantsto become a ravening rover" myself.

Damin turns out to be more like a constraint language, similar to Basic English. The host language is Lardil, which is a full sized language. The creators of Damin make up 150 -200 new words with a completely different phonotactics and phonetic inventory. They still use Lardil morphology with the new stems. So Damin could have equally been called Basic Lardil, but with a goal of ease of learning instead of (one way) mutual intelligibility.

Here is a quote of myself from a post I made to another forum.

Damin is a dead language and every time I go looking, I find very little about it. Although I did find this, where you search in this book for Damin a few pages. In that book, it is claimed that "can express virtually any idea" I wish there was a public lists of the 150/200 stems or morphemes it's attributed. I also read here that there is a revival project going on. Lardil was the ordinary language spoken by the people who sometimes used Damin. Here is an intriguing quote about the relationship between the two: "It [Damin] must be such that it can be it can be learned quickly and, at the same time, it much be such that it can be used, in cooperation with *Lardil* inflectional morphology and syntax, to express any idea which Lardil itself can be used to express" So this speed reader gets the impression that Damin was kind of like Basic English, but with made-up roots.

^^A bit more of a relex too though, yknow? If Basic English were relexed it would really be quite formidable if you calqued most of English's multiword verbs in, they're ridiculously productive...I've actually thought quite a lot about this.

The idea of a ceremonial language is awesome, and the opposite of practical. That is, it didn't have to have lots of redundancy nor deal with the distonctions of day today things, that was lardil's job. It could afford to be used abstractly. It's the opposite of a pidgin in a sense. It's like a functional Ithkuil.

The vocabulary would be very interesting to study but nfortunately it seems *very* dead or someone would be speaking it, right? I'll try to track down this book.